Response to "The Money Spent Selling Sugar to Americans is Staggering"

Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/the-money-spent-selling-sugar-to-americans-is-staggering/407350/

The picture, more than the title, was what really pulled me in. It's what appears to be a Pop Tart cut into the shape of a gun. It was an interesting concept because food is supposed to create a sense of comfort, yet the photograph implied that there is a silent threat disguised as high fructose corn syrup in most of the foods Americans eat.
Moving onto the actual content, Hamblin's statement about "real" food stood out the most. He explained that we have come to associate "real" with the idea of "healthy" when it comes to food. And when a snack is "made with real fruit" the consumer subconsciously thinks that it must be healthier than a completely artificial equivalent, even though the percentage that is "real" is unspecified. This is only one of the many ways marketers get us to buy their products.
In addition, he also brings in how "real" food, like fruits and vegetables, have come to be classified as "specialty crops" by the USDA. In another class, I had seen a documentary on the American diet, which seemed to correlate very closely to this article. It's often not a choice that many Americans eat so much high fructose corn syrup. Because the government subsidizes corn so much, many people can't afford to eat real food, and have to settle for processed, cheap alternatives.
It seems like many of the world's problems can be traced back to money: processed food, climate change, exploitation, deforestation, the list goes on. And the more money is spent on selling cheap, sugary food, the more easily available and accessible it is.